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Gayl Jones's Corregidora Madhu Dubey argues tha

Madhu Dubey argues that dating back to the time of the publication of Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens in 1974, black feminist literary critics have used the metaphor of matrilineage to authorize the construction of a black feminine literary tradition (Dubey 245). Consequently, essays by such critics tend to posit the mother as the origin of the black women's literary tradition, as well as the guarantor of the tradition through time. Dubey argues that this black feminist appropriation of the metaphor of literary matrilineage acquires special resonance from the peculiar history of black motherhood in America (245). The significance of this tradition is exemplified in a novel such as Gayl Jones's Corregidora. Specifically, Jones uses the novel to demonstrate the strength of the tradition and its temporal significance and to illustrate how one woman breaks through the possibly debilitating effects of such a tradition on individual self-realization.

Historical representation plays an important and thoroughly problematized role in Corregidora. Jones portrays such representations as contested fields that persist into the present rather than as a series of past, finished events (McKible 224). Because slavers destroyed evidence that could later incriminate them, only the oral history surrounding Ursa's name preserves the knowledge of the indignities experienced by her foremothers. As agents of historical preservation, the Corregidora women perform the crucial task of sustaining the past and transmitting it to future generations (Dubey 252). Adam McKible quotes Marx's description of history in The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in an attempt to describe the way representations of history are performed in the novel. The quote is instructive: "Men [and women] make their own history, but not spontaneously, under conditions they have chosen for themselves; rather on terms immediately existing, given and handed...

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Gayl Jones's Corregidora Madhu Dubey argues tha. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:52, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1708166.html